Hitler, Evolution, and Christianity

Hitler may have thought he was employing natural selection, he may have thought he got the idea from Darwin. Hitler wasn't employing natural selection, and had Darwin never mentioned natural selection Hitler would probably still have done what he did.It was known centuries before Darwin's grandad was a lad that you could breed certain characteristics into animals and people. Agriculture and the domestication of animals proved that beyond doubt. Artificial selection (where man sets the parameters of selection) was a totally accepted phenomena (and indeed where Darwin got his idea from in the first place).Therefore, Hitler actually used the ancient agricultural methods of selective breeding to the extreme. He realized that there was too much risk that the breeding program would be thrown off course by unwanted specimens breeding with his studs. He couldn't erect a fence to keep his studs isolated from the runts, so he killed the runts so they wouldn't contaminate the gene poolHitler may have been inspired by Mendel and selective breeding, but he did not practice natural selection. He created environments where only those he deemed worthy of survival would survive, not environments where those most capable of surviving would survive.We could argue, that the whole thing was an example of natural selection. Hitler had no children, was violent, sociopathic and genocidal. He got selected against.Is it a perversion of Darwinism? No, its a perversion of breeding techniques used by farmers, falsely credited to Darwin.

Naturally it was simplification. Obviously what fences could be erected were erected...but those fences weren't very adequate. You don't have to marry someone before conceiving a child with them. Whilst that may have some truth - Hitler et al were concerned with the purity of German race. Now the Volk issue has been raised, and I think that has some relevance here, but I don't think that is the only explanation. Would Hitler have been OK if every superman had conceived children with Jews? I imagine he would have killed the Jews and their children. The more Jews in the population, the more 'watered down' the Aryan race became...both in Us vs Them numbers game and in a half-caste kind of way too.

Whilst 'there is none' is about right, that doesn't mean there aren't definitions out there. Answers.com is great for these kinds of things: Its a little (ahem) vague, but its as good as there is I believe.

I suppose there are some. I don't know what, if any, differences the definition of race has with the definition of 'breed' (I appreciate that breed is an artificial thing, wheras race is natural). Perhaps there are species which can interbreed, but don't because of mating ritual variances, or colour pattern clashes...these could be called races.